MIDHEAVEN

My name is Jodi. I live alone on the western slope of the Carson Range, five miles up the mountain from the highway between Incline and South Tahoe. Each morning I climb the hill and watch the tour boat make its turn toward Emerald Bay. It cuts a wake through the choppy water, surrounds itself in foam and sets a straight course southwest toward the peaks they call Desolation. There the snow has stayed all summer, a dozen shades of red when sunset meets the fog from the lake. It will be there in the last days, when the earth is scorched and the rivers boil. And halfway up Mount Tallac is a cross of snow all through the year.

Charley’s dad built this cabin where I stay to hide, cramped between the hill, two mossy boulders and a row of second growth fir. Vines and manzanita from the hillside cover the roof and drape the southern window, which looks out on the meadow, and take second root between the granite stones in the path around the cabin.

The cabin is split pine and fir logs and scrap boards Charley’s dad ― who everybody just calls Walker — salvaged and dragged up the mountain. It has a loft in one end where I sleep. In daylight I draw a tarp over the window so no one who might pass on the creek road can see its reflection. The land is Toiyabe National forest, but loggers have been here; the big trees were cut down years ago all the way up to Marlette Lake, and the road has washes and fallen stumps that only hikers can cross. No one besides Charley will find me here.

A cast-iron stove and a matt on crates and plywood fill the end of the cabin near the door, opposite the loft. It’s a small cabin, fifteen feet long and ten feet wide. The floor is bare split pine with splinters, and the cracks in the wall have never been caulked. I fill them with rags and socks and cardboard, but the wind always finds more. Charley brought me a little girl’s mirror with a pink frame and handle. Sometimes at nights I sit by the fire and stare at myself. Once boys thought I was pretty. My legs are long and my eyes are large and nearly black, so people used to notice them and not see that my nose is too thin and curls up too much at the end and, that my lips are flat and wide and there is a gap between my two front teeth, which always made me slow to smile. I used to be tan but now I’m just dark; my skin is cracked and dirty and I never comb my hair. I should cut it off. I’m very ugly, but I don’t care. No one will come up to see me but Charley, unless it’s to capture me and lock me away wherever they put killers.

* * * *

The day I came here, in June, I hitched a ride out of King’s Beach with a man who said I seemed disturbed because I couldn’t sit still or keep my hands from eyes. He offered to take me home with him. I screamed and he dropped me at Sand Harbor.

On the first ridge I stopped because I thought I heard Charley calling. But when I looked, he was nowhere. I hid behind a cedar and stared across the road at the campground and watched children hopping from camper vans and dashing to the beach and I cried. Because I was grown up, and because I had no family anymore, and no faith, and because of all the evil I had done.

Up the logging road I busied myself with remembering other days I had made the same climb, but whenever a deer or fox rustled a bush, I wondered if the rustling might be Charley. I cussed him and threw stones till I felt foolish, as if a crowd were watching.

It was one of those times I first heard a screech from far up the mountain, then a whine like the wind through a tunnel only quivery, like a person’s falsetto. I watched for a squirrel to perk up its ears or for birds to stop flying and look back, but only I seemed to hear it. I scrambled up toward the voice as if it came from the end of a rainbow, running so I tripped in ruts and scraped my arms and hands and wiped the blood and sweat into my eyes. A motor sputtered. I slid down a bank to hide. A trail bike skidded around a bend, spun then righted and blasted back down the road.

At the edge of a stream where I stopped to drink was a bird with one wing unhinged in the water. I had never seen such a bird before, the size of a large hawk, with white wings and a golden belly. A bloody groove parted its head, its eyes were crossed and its beak spread as if in a gasp. I horrified me so, I ran and buried myself in high grass and pounded my fists in the mud. “Charley,” I screamed, “please kill me.”

I waited, so tensed and silent I heard insects splash in the stream, but Charley wasn’t there. No Charley, no Philip, no Jesus. Only horror and evil that circled above me like vultures and turned the dirt beneath me to stone, so I prayed to the God I didn’t believe in anymore, for hours, till the sun was straight above. Then I climbed, dizzy and giddy, and by instinct I made the right turns. I dashed into the cabin, powered by a deep relief because I was alone, really alone for the first time. And I promised myself to cast everyone out of my life forever. Feeling heartless and proud, I swept the floor and shook out the blankets, dragged the mattress outside to air, and scraped the windows and washed them with a bucket of water from the creek. Then Charley came. Just before dark.

He found me in a corner of the loft, curled up and facing the wall. “Go away, go away,” I whispered.

He climbed up and reached for my hand but I jerked it back. “I looked all over for you,” he said. “Down at the pier, your folks’ place, Hidden Beach, the hot springs, at your church. I knew you’d be up here but I hoped you wouldn’t. It’s not good for you. Too much happened here.”

“I knew you’d be right behind me, Charley. I can’t ever get rid of you, or Geoff or my dad. Poor Jodi needs a man, you think, so you hang on like ticks but you can’t change a damned thing.”

He sat and hung his legs off the loft, unlaced his boots and tossed them below. “I can go back if that’s what you want. I just brought food and some of your clothes.”

“Well you didn’t have to. I can do all right by myself.”

“Sure you can,” he said. “You can sit up here and think all summer. That’s just what you need, lots of time to think. And you can run around in those same jeans, forage, and sneak up on deer, slit their throats. If that’s what you want.”

Charley stayed on. He hung shelves, cleared brush for a bath to the dam he built upstream. He gathered and chopped logs and kindling, transplanted wild bulbs to a garden by the door where he said they would bloom next spring. Every few days he went down the mountain, to Incline where he slipped into my folks’ house when they were gone, snuck out with sweaters and jeans, pajamas and ski caps and warm socks. He sold things for money to buy me books and writing tablets and tubes of oil paints and canvases, and canned food, corn meal, peanut butter and dried everything. I didn’t thank him. I snubbed and ignored him and pouted, moped in the cabin while he tried to talk me into climbing trees so we could sit on branches like we used to do, squealing noises we pretended would call bears or elephants or whatever I wanted. Some days I walked off alone, but never far from the cabin, not to explore or think, not even to cry, just to remember Philip, so I could keep on hating.

Charley built a platform in a fir on the ridge from where we could see the lake. He sat there at dusk after he quit working, picking off pine cones with a sling shot and inviting me to come up, but I never would.

He said he told my folks I had gone to Mexico with the Children of God. When he asked me to write a letter to tell them I was okay, I said he and his advice should go to hell.

* * * *

Now the aspens in the grove upstream have begun to turn, and the last wildflowers, mouse-ears and monks-hood, have wilted. The hummingbirds left the creek in the meadow a few days ago and only a few butterflies stay on. A chipmunk with a broken and dragging tail, who used to follow behind and nibble while I picked wild mint, left or died. The flies and mosquitoes are dying, the crickets sing softer and farther down the mountain and the wind wakes me in the mornings. Nightfall comes earlier, I sleep later, the mountain prepares for winter and I get lonelier every day.

I drop the tarp over the window each morning, then I make oatmeal or millet and coffee and sit on the bank to eat before I go down to the creek. I wash my face in the creek and clean dishes or draw faces in the mud, then I turn back to the cabin and try to read books but the words jump out and dive away and nothing means anything. I make tea and climb the hill past the outhouse, sit on a rock or log and watch sailboats tack along the shore around Dollar’s Point, leaning toward the public beach and the pier. If I could, I might stare at it from dawn to dark till memory drove me crazy.

In the afternoons I stay in the cabin and sketch landscapes in charcoals, always of the lake and the south shore hotels and the far peaks shaded by faces in the clouds. Or I hike up the mountain and shout for echoes. At night I sweat by the stove and read my journals, if the words will stay still, until memories exhaust me. In my sleep I’m plagued by nightmares, and sometimes I wake up in the meadow.

Charley lives in King’s Beach again. All week he works with Pancho building block walls for rich Incline people, and on Saturdays he always comes up, brings what I need and asks what I’ve been doing. I tell him what I can remember, which isn’t much, because most every day is the same. I’m not angry with him anymore. I’ve decided to forgive the one person who has proven that he cares for me, no matter what I have done. But whenever he asks me to go back down the mountain, I scream at him to leave and call him names.

I’m only eighteen years old. Six months ago I was still a girl. If I could turn time around, I would run back home before the snows come and my dad would pet me and hold me so tight I’d cry till the pain stopped, till I believed he loved me again and had hurt enough to be as sorry as I am. Then I’d dress up warm and run down to the beach by the marina, skip stones on the lake and dig channels for the wavelets to run up. At dark I’d climb the road and we’d play cards while my mom painted. At bedtime I’d kiss my folks and my brothers good night ― and Charley too, if he was over — then curl up in clean sheets with flowers on them, watch the moon shadows of branches on the ceiling and wait for tomorrow when I could take my dog Sherlock on a picnic by a fishing stream above Emerald Bay.

When I wake up at nights I try to remember my dreams so I can guess what they mean and decide what to do, how and what to think about to keep myself from turning to stone. But usually all I can remember is the feelings of revulsion and nausea, when the nights are cold. Winter is coming. I don’t believe I can make it through the winter.